Archive for the ‘birthday’ Category

I tolled the too-many bells of my 40th birthday in January of last year in Hawaii with a luau replete with 100+ family and friends from all over the globe and mayjah major ono kine grindz. I was there for 4 weeks, picking up and leaving my office. I wrote in my hardbound journal,

This year must have something in it that heralds joy. I still cringe at the thought of my office and dealing with clients who are irritating – my own definition. I don’t want that to define me.

I also left behind a husband who didn’t come to celebrate my milestone. The hurt of that should have been my light-bulb moment. But it wasn’t. Ever, as I have said before, the eternal optimist.

The crisis point…when (we) were not speaking and I wanted to run away and escape from my life…We are not happy, but there is a duty for each of us to change, to take responsibility for the things that are within the scope of our roles as husband and wife. I work in rounds of filling voids. I am always seeking — SOMETHING. Feeling validated, that elusive chimera. Hanging on to a dream of the unattainable; perhaps unsustainable is a better word.

Hele On Hula Auntie

Going back to Hawai’i to bring in my 40th year took us to our roots. The Aunties all came out in droves. Music, hula, food. 40 was just that; four decades that we celebrated on the Big Island where my Daddy grew up and where he met my mom when she left the mainland to go to college at University of Hawai’i.

I went there too, over 20 years ago now. An odd experiment at that time in books and covers. My cover, for the first time in my life, looked like most everyone else’s around me. On campus, if I stood in a group, I wasn’t the odd woman out amidst my blond-haired, blue-eyed friends. My hapa features weren’t so out of place. But as soon as I opened my mouth, out popped the haole. People did double-takes. Locals stopped mid-sentence when I spoke to them. “Eh, you one haole, ah?” It didn’t take me too long to figure out that they were asking me if I was a white girl. At home no one ever quite knew what to make of me, either; I sounded and dressed like everyone else, but I looked…different. “What are you?” What am I? Uhm, a girl. “No, I mean, are you Mexican? You don’t look Mexican. What are you?!” White, Hawaiian and a little sprinkling of Chinese. Going to school in Hawaii, it was the same all over again, just turned inside-out. My pages or my cover, something was always just a tad off.

Twenty years, though, smoothed over much of that. I didn’t care anymore. My Aunties were all there, in their muumuus and leis, plumeria behind their ears, ukuleles in hand. They cooked for me. They played for me. They danced for me. My cousins were there too, with their kids. They all came up to me, hugs and kisses and leis. And that’s when it happened. That’s when I realized I was already on the other side of something that I didn’t even realize I had climbed over. Because that’s when all the kids called me Auntie. Horrors!

I was an AUNTIE! Are these moments universal? The ones that are really not that big of a deal, but which still fall like Newton’s apple and bonk you on the head? Maybe when someone calls you ma’am, or you’re suddenly invisible in the grocery store aisle. You manage to side step the big stuff, like your husband choosing to stay home from the family vacation and from celebrating your big four-oh, only to have your whole existence recodified by one shrill, little voice saying, “‘Ey! Auntie! Happy Birthday!”

Auntie. Hmm. I don’t even know how to hula and tuning a ukulele is beyond me. But now I have something to look forward to. When they have their 40th birthday, I can sit back and drink a beer, comfy in my muumuu, leis piled on my neck, smacking my lips as I watch the look on their faces as they get called “Auntie” for the very first time.

(Daddy got out his ukulele and jammed at the luau, but I don’t have any video of it, so I’ll share some “Mach 4” from Hawaiian ukulele maestro Kalei Gamiao. Did you know you could do that with a ukulele? I sure as shootin’ didn’t.)